Plumbers, Threats, Fascists & Learning
It starts in hushed tones, then grows cacophonous.
Have you noticed a change in the tone of interactions in the last month or so? I have.
We can see our social, political and cultural context for what it is. Naming it helps us see it.
He may be from reality TV, he may be laughable, but he is a fascist, saying fascistic things and doing fascistic things, and he’s not alone. Across Europe too, a cloud is settling. There is anger, dismay, hopelessness and there are people - men, especially - who are looking to the far right for a sense of pride and purpose.
The dividing lines between them and us are being drawn tightly around straight young men (and boys). They are being encouraged to put themselves in opposition to women, to the LGBTQ+ community and especially transgender people, to those outside their own countries, to those who are not white, to those who disagree.
Let me be clear, I am not suggesting men are innocent victims of a charm offensive here. Hate and an ill-expressed fear are propelling them away from those with any axis of difference from them.
The ultimate irony being, of course, that the people whose lives are truly the most different from their own are those of the morally void billionaires they idolise. It is not a mutual respect at all. Wealth and power are their own drives.
What’s that got to do with me? With you?
Well, everything really. Are you sensing something in the air?
I was talking with a friend who asked whether I had noticed that our local high street has a really unsettled vibe about it. The sense that something could ‘go off’ at any minute, a sort of bristling rage that is pulsing through the cracks in the pavement.
I see it.
A couple of days ago, I was walking to the London Underground station and could see a man in the path in front of me. I am hypervigilant and for whatever reason, he stirred a sense of threat in me before I got to him. He was standing still, digging through a large carrier bag.
I couldn’t go past him without going close to him, and as I did, he reared up and snarled the words “I’m gonna fucking kill you” in my ear.
For better or worse, my autopilot took over and I gave no reaction at all, just carried on walking, thinking that running might provoke a worse response. I was certainly not going to look back at him.
I kept walking and thought I was safe, and then a glass bottle crashed onto the ground and smashed close behind me.
Again, I kept walking, in the most ironic case of nominative determinism imaginable.
I looked back and he had gone. Aside from noting that he wore a gold hat - which makes it sound like I’ve invented him - I can’t tell you anything about his appearance. I avoided looking at him precisely out of the accurate but hypervigilant sense that danger was afoot.
What have these things got to do with each other?
How might the rise of geopolitical fascist politics relate to this stranger, who was likely on such a heavy drug trip he forgot what he did as he did it?
I think both of them manage to interrupt the illusion of calm and orderly life that we try to convince ourselves is reality.
Both Trump and his saluting sidekick trigger something supranatural in me, and I’m not alone in noticing this.
This fascinating article in the New Yorker explores the phenomenon of Trump dreams/nightmares. In it, we meet Martha Crawford, a psychotherapist who noticed that she was having dreams featuring Trump, and began to catalogue those of people who were experiencing the same phenomenon.
“He was a looming figure in people’s psyches.
In the 3000 collected dream recollections, patterns emerged. People’s mothers were dating Trump in dreams. Trump was an alien in dreams. Trump as antichrist.
Especially interesting were the number of dreams in which people collaborated with Trump, empathising with him, but then they woke up and felt disgusted.
The article ends like this.
American politics no longer follows the logic of institutions or the law. It follows the logic of dreams. Rational approaches produce absurdities. “I don’t believe these dreams are about Donald Trump. I believe these dreams are about us,” Crawford said. “They’re about some aspect of our own psyche that we haven’t dealt with.”
I try not to use religious language in my day-to-day godless speech.
I live and work in a very diverse area, where we don’t really know each other’s backgrounds and worldviews. I would say that among my closest friends, roughly a third of them practise a religion. Most of the children and families I have worked with over the last 15 years practise Islam or Hinduism, and most of my colleagues too.
I say this to give context to the fact that whilst I am in a place saturated with religiosity, being close friends with many faithful people, I am now and always have been somebody with no religious belief.
I don’t easy gravitate towards (what I perceive to be) religious ways of thinking or seeing, but something has changed recently. It’s not a religious conversion, in any sense, but it feels like something else, coming from a similar place.
Faced with a world being reshaped to cruelty, barbarism and inhumanity by a cabal of super-wealthy white chancers, my own psyche is conjuring different language.
I find myself instinctively thinking of things as demonic. As possessed. As bearing devilish marks. Shaytān. The lack of humanity suggests the presence of something else. What fills the void? Or is it the hollowness that chills?
I find myself unable to express the rage, the frustration and the powerlessness. And again, I find myself not alone in this.
I called a plumber over yesterday to unclog my drainage pipe on my washing machine. He diagnosed the problem in about 30 seconds, fixed it within 10 minutes, but we ended up immersed in conversation in my kitchen for close to two hours.
He saw my framed poster calling for the liberation of Palestine, and he drew attention to it. We spoke about war, about deceit, about his aversion to deception, and not paying (I think he was making sure I would follow up with cash - fair). We spoke about Peter Tosh, and he recited lyrics to me, as we tested the flowing of my drainpipe.
‘Everyone is crying out for peace, yes / None is crying out for justice.’
We shared stories we had gleaned from our grandparents, and how our worldviews have shaped.
I shared the Yorkshire dictum of ‘be reyt’ - things can sort themselves.
He shared something to the effect of ‘the ants will keep you updated’ - we might be dead and buried before the balance is restored.
He shared this, which I liked.
‘People these days do their shopping in Sainsbury’s but try to pay in ASDA.”
Look at everything I’ve described above, we could say a couple of different things.
Perhaps I have just over-examined the actions of an elected tyrant, an unstable bottle-throwing stranger and an unexpected chat with a great plumber.
I cannot help but look at this mundaneness with the mythical lens of the trickster.
These fraught, bitter times are fomenting different ways of thinking. Strangers are exchanging old wisdom to guard each other from the storms to come. Sharing songs.
And why trickster?
Trickster draws their power differently to the tyrant - they whip it up from the fringes of things, from the margins and from liminal spaces. Social spaces, like the chats on public transport, the idle words of strangers testing a broken washing machine, and like dreaming.
When the plumber left, I - somewhat embarrassingly - thanked him for clearing the plumbing in my head too. I was grateful he didn’t charge me extra for it.
“I’m just a plumber, what do I know?” he said, enigmatically.
In these times, we can seek out the latent meanings of things by attuning to the synchronicities. The connections are there if we are ready to recognise them.
And in that spirit, see what I found when I scrolled a little lower down the Youtube list to find the Peter Tosh song…
A callback to my bottle-smashing muse.
I don't think you've over-examined it at all. It's scary. We need more people like yourself who are alert to the meaningful connections between the huge and the tiny. Also: talking to strangers is a radical act these days.